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Narrative

Rumint Isn’t News

Autumn Belfontaine was trying very hard not to listen in on the sales director’s halfalogue from the next room. Tempted as she was to close the newsroom door, it would be simply too obvious a message of I don’t want to hear you, and in its own way as rude as blatant eavesdropping.

By effort of will she readdressed herself to the wire service feeds. These days they were getting awfully spotty, and worse, she was a lot less confident in their accuracy. Once she’d been able to recognize all the major correspondents’ names at a glance, but more and more of them had disappeared in the last few weeks. Several times she’d realized it had been some time since she’d seen a single story filed by one or another big-name correspondent, and she’d end up losing an hour or more searching backward for the last time that person’s byline had shown up.

Even more worrying was how many completely new names were showing up. A lot of their writing seemed really shaky, not just in their composition skills, but in the depth and diligence of their research. More than once, she had a bad feeling that they were taking friend-of-a-friend stories and treating them like actual reporting.

Quite honestly, a lot of it sounds like it’s on the level of me and Brenda Redmond talking this morning about how she overheard her folks talking about a problem down in Agriculture with some of the irrigation systems. If she heard her dad right, it could wipe out a big chunk of our soybean crop, which would mean a big hit on our protein supply.

But second-hand reports like those were leads, not news. Autumn considered whether she wanted to call down to Agriculture for confirmation. Even as she was weighing the pros and cons, a familiar voice called her name.

She looked up to find Spruance Del Curtin standing at the door. He was a bit early for his air shift, but right now he didn’t have a class or any other obligation right beforehand.

“Hi, Sprue. What are you looking for?”

Sprue sauntered across the newsroom. If he’d been approaching one of her reporters, Autumn would’ve been ready to intervene. The kid had a reputation for hitting on girls every chance he got. However, he was well aware that Autumn was family, the daughter of one of his clone-brothers, and therefore off-limits for amatory adventures.

He cast an uneasy glance around the room. “I need to talk to you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Maybe. Right now, I don’t have a whole lot of data to go on. But while I was up at the Astronomy department, I overheard a couple of the solar people talking about a new CME. They’re pretty sure it’ll miss the Moon, but it’s possible its outer edges could graze Earth’s magnetosphere.”

“Which could affect electric transmissions and electronics.” At least where they still even have electricity. From some of the reports she was getting, it sounded like some areas had come apart so badly that they couldn’t even keep power plants running. “If you think there’s a big risk, I can try to contact the solar astronomers directly and see what they’re actually looking at.” As soon as she noticed the first hints of alarm in Sprue’s expression, she added, “Don’t worry, I won’t mention your name. They should understand that journalists sometimes need to protect their sources.”

“Thanks.” Sprue’s voice still sounded tighter than his usual confident tone. “Maybe it’s nothing, but if there is a danger, at least this way you can find out what’s going on.”

“You’re welcome.” Autumn cast a significant look at the clock on the other side of the room. “And you’d better start getting ready for your air shift.”

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Paying the Bills

An explosion of incalculable magnitude in Yellowstone Park propelled lava and ash across the landscape and into the atmosphere, forever altering the climate of the entire continent. Nothing grows from the tainted soil. Stalled and stilled machines function only as statuary.

People have been scraping by on the excess food and goods produced before the eruption. But supplies are running low. Natural resources are dwindling. And former police officer Colin Ferguson knows that time is running out for his family—and for humanity….

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Narrative

From the Top

Reggie Waite usually ran Shepardsport with a relatively light hand. He picked division heads who knew their lines of work and trusted them to pick subordinates who were competent in their own areas, and to generally run their respective divisions without needing to be micromanaged.

However, there was always the occasional matter that really needed to be seen in person. And the news from Agriculture was just one of those kinds.

Alice Murcheson always made him think of some of the older women at church when he was growing up back in Salem. Not just the graying hair and the smile lines at the corners of her eyes, but also a certain maternal air about her that made a person feel at home.

Today those lines were downturned, and the atmosphere around her was filled with an uneasy tension. “We were lucky we discovered the problem at all. All the indicators were showing adequate flow, so we assumed everything was fine.”

Reggie looked from Alice to the image of the affected greenhouse, the people in breathing gear carrying buckets of water to the affected plantings. “And with the carbon dioxide levels you’re running in those greenhouses, there’s a big temptation to just trust your readouts.”

Alice nodded, her expression regretful. “We ought to be doing more frequent inspections of all the plantings, but until we can get a lot more people through oxygen-delivery training and able to use breathing rigs–” She left the sentence hanging.

Reggie understood the problem all too well. The Expulsions had enormously expanded the population of Shepardsport, primarily in the younger age cohorts. Although some of the kids were finally getting old enough to qualify for the necessary training, it still was behind the numbers they needed to properly inspect all the plantings necessary to feed the settlement’s population and keep up with their obligations to provide prepared meals to the various outposts scattered around Farside. The kids could teleoperate inspection robots, but even with spex and haptic feedback gloves, it was still far too easy to miss things.

Especially if it’s not something you’ve been trained to look for, which is what Ken Redmond thinks happened. Reggie had all too many memories of such situations back in the Energy Wars. The Navy — heck, the whole freaking Department of Defense — was pushing people through their training programs way too fast, which meant a lot of people with surface facility with the skills and techniques, but no deep understanding of the underlying principles. Even his own flight training had been horribly rushed by peacetime standards, and he’d learned a heck of a lot on the job.

But there was no use dwelling on how close things had been three decades ago. Right now, they needed to deal with the current problem, so they could get these highly-skilled people back to the jobs where they were really needed.

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Narrative

Sunrise Surprise

Cindy knew she wasn’t supposed to be studying for class during her work hours, but right now there wasn’t anything to actually do beside wait for someone to call in or drop by. And she sure didn’t want someone to decide to make busywork for her to do, just so they could feel like the station was getting its money’s worth out of her.

Because there’s always someone who confuses Visible Busy with actual productivity. And if they’re someone in authority, pointing it out to them would be insubordination.

One good thing about what she was working on right now, it would look busy to a casual observer. Hold her tablet at the right angle, and she would look like a very diligent worker.

Still, it meant that she was just a bit edgy about having someone get behind her. Aunt Betty would probably tell her it was a sign of a guilty conscience, and Ken Redmond would say that bending rules was not a good habit to get into, because it eroded the barriers against doing it on the things that could get people killed.

Except it turned out to be Lou Corlin, taking a break during a long set. “Something’s going on. There’s three PSA’s on food waste on my ad schedule, and I know I heard Brenda play another two. We haven’t done this many since things first started getting hairy.”

Cindy considered how to respond. Lou was a real straight-arrow, not the sort of guy who’d chat up a girl in hopes of making a play on her. Which meant he had some serious concerns.

“I’ve noticed it too. And yesterday Juss Forsythe went by in a real hurry, carrying a breathing rig. Which means he must’ve needed to work on something in a non-breathable atmosphere, but not dangerous enough to require a full environmental suit.”

“Like some of the greenhouse farms. Running them at high concentrations of carbon dioxide really pushes plant growth.” Lou’s thick, dark eyebrows always made him look grim when he was thinking hard. “If something went wrong in one of them and they lost a bunch of plants, that would explain all the PSA’s about food waste.”

“But how could we find out? I mean, if they’re keeping it quiet for a reason, asking too many questions could get us into a lot of trouble.”

“Brenda’s mom is head of Food and Nutrition. She’d know, and I’d bet Brenda could ask without getting in trouble.”

“Which leaves us with the problem of figuring out how to get her to ask without looking obviously nosy.”

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In the aftermath of the supervolcano’s eruption in Yellowstone Park, North America is covered in ash. Farmlands cannot produce food. Machinery has been rendered useless. Cities are no longer habitable. And the climate across the globe grows colder every day.

Former police officer Colin Ferguson’s family is spread across the United States, separated by the catastrophe and struggling to survive as the nation attempts to recover and reestablish some measure of civilization….

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Document

Keeping Civilization Running

Movies and television have made us familiar with the trope of the tiny community maintaining a level of technological civilization by scavenging and repairing their various devices, even repurposing parts of other technologies. However, while such efforts can create visually striking sets, it is highly questionable whether such measures could actually succeed in practice, particularly over the long term.

No matter how carefully one conserves and stretches one’s resources, eventually all machinery fails. And the more sophisticated one’s equipment, the more difficult it is to repair when one’s supply of spare parts runs out. A village blacksmith might well be able to handcraft replacement parts for a steam engine, but fabricating a replacement circuit board for a robotic delivery system is far more difficult.

As the diablovirus pandemic progressed and manufacturing and transportation systems began to unravel, the lunar settlements were faced with the question of how well they could sustain themselves in the absence of replacement parts from Earth. On a world where even the most basic sustenance required sophisticated technological systems, there wasn’t the option of falling back to a lower level of technology.

Even a decade earlier, such a situation probably would have left the lunar pioneers with little choice but to put their systems on standby and return to Earth. However, in the years leading up to the Expulsions, there had been an increasing emphasis on reducing the dependence upon expensive spacelift out of Earth’s deep gravity well in favor of the utilization of lunar and asteroidal materials. This included a shift to supplying the largest settlements with the tools to produce the tools rather than shipping a continual stream of spare parts “uphill.”

However, there were still limits to how much could be produced locally, particularly in relation to “surge capacity,” the ability to replace a large number of damaged pieces of equipment in a relatively short time. And with the Sun entering a period of increased flare activity, there was every reason to be concerned about EMP effects on vital electronics, particularly as related to solar panels and communications equipment that were necessarily located on the surface, where they could not be shielded with lunar regolith.

—- Kennard Redmond, Memoirs of an Engineer on the High Frontier. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2055.

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Narrative

When It Rains, It Pours

Spruance Del Curtin had come to the Astronomy Department a little early today in hopes of touching base with Dr. Doorne, not just about his ongoing work for her, but also about the statistics class which had been in a state of suspension ever since the first serious CME threat. However, he arrived to find the entire department in what could only be described as a situation of organized chaos.

People were coming and going, about half of them talking on their phones. From the halfalogues he could hear, it sounded like most of them were talking to colleagues elsewhere in the Earth-Moon system. Whatever it was, it clearly had them worried, but most of what they were saying was way too technical for him to make heads or tales of. A lot of numbers, terms that made him think of the engineering side of radio broadcasting, all of which soon became such an intense information overflow that there was no way he could even hope to follow it.

And then here was Dr. Doorne, breaking off a conversation with someone on the other end of a phone connection. “Sprue, I have a new data set I need you to sanitize ASAP. You’ll find it in the usual folder.” She rattled off a file name that was an alphanumeric string.

There was nothing to do but say, “Yes, ma’am” and hurry over to the computer. Already Dr. Doorne was heading off to confer with someone else about whatever she was getting from her colleague elsewhere.

As soon as Sprue logged on and pulled up the data file, he had a good idea what it probably was. However, Dr. Doorne’s tone made it pretty clear that he was not to ask any questions or or otherwise do anything that would compromise his ability to get the data ready for whatever she was planning to do with it. Whatever it represented, it was so critical that there was no time to risk introducing bias because he just had to find out what he was looking at.

And if he was right and it did involve solar activity data, it might well be a matter of life and death for people in space and some of the smaller lunar habitats that weren’t nearly as well shielded as a big settlement like Shepardsport.

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Narrative

Bad News

Ken Redmond had sent Juss Forsythe down to talk with Alice Murchison in Agriculture, thinking they were dealing with yet another irritating little problem. The sort of problem they’d been dealing with whack-a-mole fashion ever since the Expulsions. Way too many of the new greenhouses had been thrown together as fast as they could and maintain an acceptable standard of safety.

Instead, Juss had just texted him with the message that the leak was not just a bad fitting, like most of the leaks they’d been chasing down and fixing over the past several years. Instead, he was looking at several thousand meters of substandard plastic tubing that was breaking down. While there were some obvious leaks, complete with water spraying across the area, far more were a matter of slow seepage, which could easily be mistaken for condensation — and probably had been, given that most of them were in the greenhouses that were run with high levels of carbon dioxide to encourage more rapid plant growth.

Which goes to show just how much we need to increase the number of people around here who have the necessary certifications to work in those areas. As long as we’re really understaffed in those areas, it’s way too easy to hurry through the standard maintenance procedures, and not really look at everything. We’re damned lucky that it was “just” a bunch of irrigation lines.

However, all that was long-term. Right now, he had two problems he needed to deal with. First, he needed to find out how quickly his people could fabricate replacement tubing for the material that was immediately defective. Second, he needed to determine whether the tubing in question had been fabricated locally or brought in, and if the latter, where any additional tubing from that source had been used. If they’d gotten a bad batch of tubing from somewhere, they could have a ticking time bomb on their hands, and they might not find out about it until they had an accident on the level of the disaster back in ’96 that had left a whole section of the Roosa Barracks permanently sealed off.

Which meant he’d better start making some phone calls.

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The New York Times bestselling author and “maven of alternate history” (San Diego Union-Tribune) presents a near- future thriller.

A supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone Park sends lava and mud flowing toward populated areas, and clouds of ash drifting across the country. The fallout destroys crops and livestock, clogs machinery, and makes cities uninhabitable. Those who survive find themselves caught in an apocalyptic catastrophe in which humanity has no choice but to rise from the ashes and recreate the world…

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Nourishment for Body and Soul

Jenn Redmond had spent most of the morning going through inventories in preparation for her touch-base meeting with Alice Murchison. At least now she knew all the things she needed to ask the head of Agriculture, but she had very mixed feelings.

This time she was going down to Alice’s office for the meeting, which made sense. They both needed to actually see what the other was doing.

However, when she arrived, she discovered that Alice was already in a meeting with someone else. From the sound of it, something had gone seriously wrong with the drip irrigation system in one of the greenhouses, and they were having to hand-water some five hundred square meters worth of tiered vegetable plantings. Just to make it complicated, it would be in one of the high-carbon-dioxide intensive vegetable production greenhouses, which restricted who they could press into service. No one without oxygen-delivery certification could wear the self-contained breathing apparatus that was necessary to work in that atmosphere, which meant she was having to pay highly-skilled technical personnel to haul buckets of water.

But if those plants go into permanent wilt and die, people are going to be going hungry. Even as that thought came to her, Jenn recalled her experience in victory gardening back during the Energy Wars. In fact, depending on exactly what they are, even if they do come back, the yields are going to take enough of a hit that meals could get a lot smaller.

Apparently whoever was talking with Alice was on the technical side of things, because he said he’d take a look at it just as soon as he could retrieve his breathing rig from Engineering. Alice thanked him, and then the door slid open and a tall, muscular young man stepped out.

“Hello, Miz Jennifer.” Juss Forsythe was a clone of Ed White, and Ken’s all-around troubleshooter and fix-it man. “I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble.”

“No, not at all.” The words came out awkwardly, in a rush. “You obviously are dealing with a critical matter, and a routine meeting can wait.”

“Thanks. I’d better be going now.” With that, Juss hurried away to complete his errand.

At that point Alice gestured for her to come in and take a seat. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but we have a problem.”

As Alice explained the problem, Jenn listened attentively, although she was already aware of the situation. “Do you think you can save those plantings?”

“We hope so. That’s why we’ve been working so hard to hand-water them while Juss works on the irrigation system. That kid’s sharp, and it really helps that he’s finally old enough to get his oxygen-delivery certification so he can work in those greenhouses.”

“That’s good to hear. Right now, we have enough food that we can keep everyone fed a diet that meets NASA nutritional standards for the next three months. It’s going to be monotonous and not necessarily very filling, but nobody’s going to starve..”

“Which is good to hear. There are some things I can do to help make things better, but there are some foods that simply require too narrow of growing conditions for us to be able to produce them in a lunar greenhouse farm, or at least produce them in the quantities we need to feed the entire community.”

Jenn had a fairly good idea of what those were. She’d talked with her husband about whether the chemistry people down at Engineering might be able to synthesize some of the flavors of certain spices that had to be brought up from Earth. But even those would take time to work out, particularly if there wasn’t that much to work on.

We may just have to focus on keeping everyone fed, even if it isn’t the tastiest food.